The Saint Closes the Case (5 page)

There was something else there, on the
concrete floor, be
tween the four men and the goat at the other end. It
curled
and wreathed
sluggishly, lying low on the ground and not ris
ing at all; and yet, though the outside of it was fleecily inert, it
seemed as if the interior of the thing whirled and throbbed
as with the struggling of a tremendous force pent
up in ineffectual turmoil. This thing was like a cloud; but it was like no
cloud that ever rode the sky. It was a cloud such
as no sane
and shining sky had ever seen, a pale violet cloud, a cloud
out
of hell. And here and there, in the
misty violet of its colour, it
seemed
as if strange little sparks and streaks of fire shot
through it like tiny comets, gleamed momentarily,
and were
gone, so that the cloud
moved and burned as with an inner
phosphorescence.

It had been still when the Saint first set
eyes on it, but now
it moved. It did not spread aimlessly over the floor; it
was
creeping along purposefully, as though imbued with life. The
Saint,
afterwards, described it as like a great, ghostly, lumi
nous worm
travelling sideways. Stretched out in a long line
that reached from
side to side of the greenhouse, it humped
itself forward in little whirling rushes,
and the living power
within it seemed to
burn more and more fiercely, until the
cloud
was framed in a faint halo of luminance from the whirl
of eye-searing violet at its core.

It had seemed to be creeping at first, but
then the Saint saw that that impression had been deceptive. The creeping of the
cloud was now the speed of a man running, and it was plain
that it
could have only one objective. The goat at the end of
the trough was cringing
against the farthest wall, frozen with
terror, staring
wild-eyed at the cloud that rolled towards it
with the
relentlessness of an inrushing tide.

The Saint flashed a lightning glance back at
the staging,
and divined, without comprehending, why the cloud moved
so decisively. The white-haired
man was holding in one hand a thing of shining metal rather like a small
electric radiator,
which he trained on the
cloud, moving it from side to side.
From this thing seemed to come the
propulsive force which
drove the cloud along
as a controlled wind might have done.

Then the Saint looked back at the cloud; and at that instant
the foremost fringe of it touched the petrified
goat.

There was no sound that the Saint could hear
from outside.
But at once the imprisoned power within the cloud seemed
to
boil up into a terrible effervescence of fire; and where there
had been
a goat was nothing but the shape of a goat starkly
outlined in
shuddering orange-hued flame. For an instant,
only the fraction of
a second, it lasted, that vision of a dazzling
glare in the shape of
a goat; and then, as if the power that had
produced it was spent,
the shape became black. It stood of itself for a second; then it toppled slowly
and fell upon the
concrete. A little black dust hung in the air, and a
little
wreath of bluish smoke drifted up towards the roof. The violet cloud
uncoiled slothfully, and smeared fluffily over the floor in
a widening
pool of mist.

Its force was by no means spent—that was an illusion
belied
by the flickering lights that still glinted through it like a host
of tiny
fireflies. It was only that the controlling rays had been
diverted.
Looking round again, Simon saw that the white-
haired man had put
down the thing of shining metal with
which he had directed the cloud, and
was turning to speak to
the three men who had watched the
demonstration.

The Saint stood like a man in a dream.

Then he drew Patricia away, with a soft and
almost frantic
laugh.

“We’ll get out of here,” he said.
“We’ve seen enough for one
night.”

And yet he was wrong, for something else was
to be added
to the adventure with amazing rapidity.

As he turned, the Saint nearly cannoned into
the giant who
stood over them; and, in the circumstances, Simon Templar
did not feel
inclined to argue. He acted instantaneously,
which the giant was
not expecting. When one man points a
revolver at another, there is, by
convention, a certain amount
of backchat about the situation before
anything is done; but
the Saint held convention beneath contempt.

Moreover, when confronted by an armed man
twice his
own size, the Saint felt that he needed no excuse for
employ
ing any damaging foul known to the fighting game, or even a
speciality
of his own invention. His left hand struck the giant’s
gun arm aside, and at
the same time the Saint kicked with
one well-shod foot and a clear conscience.

A second later he was sprinting, with
Patricia’s hand in his.

There was a car drawn up in front of the
house. Simon had
not noticed it under the trees as he passed on his way
round
to the back; but now he saw it, because he was looking for it;
and it
accounted for the stocky figure in breeches and a
peaked cap which
bulked out of the shadows round the gate
and tried to bar the
way.

“Sorry, son,” said the” Saint
sincerely, and handed him off
with some vim.

Then he was flying up the lane at the girl’s
side, and the sounds of the injured chauffeur’s pursuit were too far behind
to be
alarming.

The Saint vaulted into the Furillac, and came
down with
one foot on the self-starter and the other on the clutch
pedal.

As Patricia gained her place beside him he
unleashed the full ninety-eight horse-power that the speedster could put
forth when
pressed.

His foot stayed flat down on the accelerator
until they were
running into Putney, and he was sure that any attempt to
give chase
had been left far astern; but even during the more sedate drive through London
he was still unwontedly taciturn,
and Patricia knew better than to try to
make him talk when
he was in such a mood. But she studied, as if she had
never
seen it before, the keen, vivid intentness of his profile as he
steered the
hurtling car through the night, and realised that
she had never felt him
so sheathed and at the same time
shaken with such a dynamic savagery of
purpose. Yet even she,
who knew him better than anyone in the world,
could not
have explained what she sensed about him. She had seen,
often
before, the inspired wild leaps of his genius; but she
could not know that
this time that genius had rocketed into a
more frantic flight
than it had ever taken in all his life. And
she was silent.

It was not until they were turning into Brook
Street that
she voiced a thought that had been racking her brain for
the
past hour.

“I can’t help feeling I’ve seen one of
those men before—or a
picture of him——
”

“Which one?” asked the Saint, a
trifle grimly, “The young
secretary bird—or Professor K. B. Vargan—or
Sir Roland
Hale—or Mr. Lester Hume Smith, His Majesty’s Secretary of
State for
War?”

He marked her puzzlement, turning to meet her
eyes. Now
Patricia Holm was very lovely; and the Saint loved her.
At
that moment, for some reason, her loveliness took him by the throat.

He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and
drew her
close to him.

“Saint,” she said, “you’re on
the trail of more trouble. I
know the signs.”

“It’s even more than that, dear,”
said the Saint softly. “To
night I’ve seen a vision. And if it’s a true
vision it means that
I’m going to fight something more horrible
than I’ve ever
fought before; and the name of it may very well be the
same
as the name of the devil himself.”

2. How Simon Templar read newspapers, and

understood what was
not written

Here may conveniently be quoted an item from
one of the
stop press columns of the following morning.

“The
Clarion
is
officially
informed that at a late hour last
night Mr. Lester Hume Smith, the
Secretary for War, and Sir
Roland Hale, Director of Chemical Research to
the War Of
fice, attended a demonstration of Professor K. B.
Vargan’s
‘electroncloud.’ The demonstration was held secretly, and
no
details will be disclosed. It is stated further that a special meeting of
the Cabinet will be held this morning to receive
Mr. Hume Smith’s
report, and, if necessary, to consider the
Government’s attitude
towards the invention.”

Simon Templar took the paragraph in his
stride, for it was
no more than a confirmation and amplification of what he
al
ready knew.

This was at ten o’clock—an extraordinary hour
for the
Saint to be up and dressed. But on this occasion he had risen early to
break the habits of a lifetime and read every page of
every newspaper that
his man could buy.

He had suddenly become inordinately
interested in politics;
the news that an English tourist hailing from
Manchester and
rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle had been arrested for
punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden fascinated
him; only
such articles as “Why Grandmothers Leave Home” (by Ethelred Sapling,
the brilliant author of
Lovers in Leeds)
continued to leave him
entirely icebound.

But he had to wait for an early edition of the
Evening Rec
ord
for the account of
his own exploit.

“… From footprints found this morning
in the soft soil,
it appears that three persons were involved—one of them a
woman. One of the men, who must have been of exceptional
stature,
appears to have tripped and fallen in his flight, and
then to have made off
in a different direction from that taken
by his companions,
who finally escaped by car.

“Mr. Hume Smith’s chauffeur, who
attempted to arrest these
two, and was knocked down by the man,
recovered too
late to
reach the road in time to take the number of
their car. From
the sound of the exhaust, he judges it to have been some
kind
of high-powered sports model. He had not heard its approach
or the
entrance of the three intruders, and he admits that
when he first saw the
man and the woman he had just woken
from a doze.

“The second man, who has been tracked
across two fields
at the back of Professor Vargan’s house, is believed to
have
been picked up by his confederates further along the road.
The fact of
his presence was not discovered until the arrival
of the detectives from
London this morning.

“Chief Inspector Teal, who is in charge
of the case, told an
Evening Record
representative that
the police have as yet
formed no theory as to what was the alarm
which caused the hurried and clumsy departure of the spies. It is believed, how
ever, that
they were in a position to observe the conclusion
of the experiment.
…”

There was much more, stunted across the two
middle col
umns of the front page.

This blew in with Roger Conway, of the
Saint’s very dear
acquaintance, who had been rung up in the small hours of
that
morning to be summoned to a conference; and he put the
sheet before Simon
Templar at once.

“Were you loose in England last
night?” he demanded ac
cusingly.

“There are rumours,” murmured the
Saint, “to that effect.”

Mr. Conway sat down in his usual chair, and
produced ciga
rettes and matches.

“Who was your pal—the cross-country
expert?” he inquired
calmly.